Why dedicated Full-Time Scrum masters are hard to implement – and what’s the alternative

More and more organizations are implementing agile with Scrum. They define teams and assign Scrum masters to the teams to start working agile and become self-organized. Although agile looks easy, to implement the Scrum master role often turns out to be problematic. Let's discuss what makes it so difficult to work with full-time Scrum masters and explore the alternative of having technical people taking the Scrum master role.

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What if we fail?

People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!

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Guest blog: Retrospective Doughnut! A fun way to measure team’s response to Retrospectives.

Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.

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Guest blog: Classifying Retrospectives to get the best of it

Retrospective is a special time dedicated to analyse the strength and weakness of the teamwork process. There is already some well known tools used to animate this meeting and we tend to use often the same kind of exercise, which can lead to demotivation among the team members and to the feeling of not being able to improve anything anymore. We need to go back to the initial goal of the retrospective : getting better together, by using the collective intelligence and by ensuring the involvement of every team member as much in the creative process as in its application.

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Spice up your Agile Retrospectives

In the mini-workshop Experience new exercises to spice up your agile retrospective #RetroValue that I gave at Lean Kanban France teams experienced three different retrospectives exercises. They learned how retrospectives can help them to gain deeper insight in their situation and came up with actions to deal with problems and improve their performance.

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We’re shipping: Valuable Agile Retrospectives on Amazon and Lulu!

I'm proud to annouce that the second edition of our successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives has been released. This edition is available in print via Amazon and Lulu and can be downloaded as eBook from InfoQ and Leanpub. It has also been translated into Dutch and published as Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives.

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Zelf-organiserende teams met Dienend Leiderschap

Binnen Agile en Lean software ontwikkeling speelt dienend leiderschap een belangrijke rol. Zelf-organiserende teams kennen een scrum master die als een dienend leider het team begeleidt en ondersteund. Vanuit deze achtergrond heb ik het boek Dienend Leiderschap van Henk Jan Kamsteeg gelezen. Het heeft mij enkele nieuwe inzichten gegeven en gestimuleerd om mij verder te verdiepen in het onderwerp.

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Designing Valuable Agile Retrospectives

As a retrospective facilitator it's important to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises which you can use to design a retrospective. Before having a retrospective meeting, you want to prepare yourself by considering which exercises would be most suitable. That depends on the team, the situation at hand, and on what the team would like to work on. Here are some tips for designing valuable agile retrospectives that help addressing specific situations.

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